Steampunk Personas and Material-Semiotic Production
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
3 • Articles • Airship Captains, Pith Helmets, & Other Assorted Brassy Bits: Steampunk Personas and Material-Semiotic Production MATTHEW HALE Indiana University Winner of the 2012 Bill Ellis Prize; NDiF Section, American Folklore Society Abstract: Steampunk is an aesthetic and ideological system that revolves around the appropriation, (re)creation, and (re)design of select aspects of the documented past. Steampunk is a generic complex. It is a form of literature and thus narrative, a design aesthetic, and a mode of material production and consumption. Within this work, the author explores the relationship between materiality and textuality within steampunk and suggest that material-semiotic hybridity, that is to say the ongoing processes through which stories and objects mutually inform, delimit, or shape one another, is central to the genre’s “form-shaping ideology” (Bakhtin 1984:92). In doing so, the author suggests that materiality (in other words, substance) and textuality (or concept) are neither separate, nor are they pure categorizes, but that they are, in fact, entangled and co-productive forces. The work of art takes its shape; the story told, the object made. Matter, both textual and material, coalesce into a single expressive whole, a mélange of words, things, actors, and actions. Anthropologist Tim Ingold argues that “students of material culture have contrived to dematerialize, or to sublimate into thought” the very objects of their focus (2011, 23). The same, of course, could be said of folkloristics. A majority of folkloristic studies of material culture employ what Ingold describes as a hylomorphic model of making. This perspective conceives of substance as the sum of matter (hyle) and form (morphe) in which “making begins with a form in mind and a formless lump of ‘raw material,’ and ends when form and matter are united in the complete artifact” (2012, 432). As an immaterial conceptual apparatus, form is therefore conceptualized as an active and dynamic a priori “pattern in the mind” (Glassie 1975), while substance is conceived as an inactive tabula rasa void of any New Directions in Folklore 4 form-shaping properties (Pye 1968). The hylomorphic model of materiality produces an understanding of objects as closed and static forms which are acted upon rather than as constellations of “substances-in-becoming” (Ingold 2012, 435). Building on Ingold’s critique, I will examine the relationship between material culture and narrative practices and how they inform, delimit, and co-produce one another. It was September 3rd, 2011, 9:00 AM, minutes before the start of the annual Dragon*Con parade. For the second day in a row, I was surrounded by works of art in motion. Convention attendees congregated in downtown Atlanta, Georgia, forming diffuse constellations around Woodruff Park. Cosplayers dressed as stormtroopers, Jedi, and Sith Lords lined up along the concave water fountain at the northern edge of the park. They polished their helmets and readied their lightsabers while enjoying conversation and coffee with their peers. A few feet away, a group of superheroes—a wash of Green Lanterns, Supermen, Spiderman, and a few of the Avengers—formed a mosaic of spandex, color, and gesture on a nearby street. They were surrounded by photographers, some in costume, others in ‘ordinary’ dress, reporters, interested local residents, and myself. As the collection of lenses pointed in their direction, the group of cosplayers assumed a recognizable pose. Their bodies froze, arms extended or crossed, muscles flared, capes adjusted. Taking refuge from the southern morning heat in a slim shadow cast by a skyscraper on Auburn Avenue North East, a group of steampunk cosplayers, perhaps a hundred in all, were engaged in discussion. Unlike the cosplayers who were dressed as a variety of recognizable popular culture characters I had seen moments before, there were no duplicates or reiterations of particular dramatis personae, just a general style Vol. 11, no. 1 (2013) 5 distributed amongst them. No two costumes were the same. Despite this heterogeneity, there was a cohesiveness to the group, a visual rhetoric or discursive order that bound each individual costumer’s creation together (Foucault 1970, 1972). Men and women, a majority between the age of twenty-five and forty, stood along the sidewalk. They talked about their costumes and accessories, discussed construction techniques, and shared stories about their reclaimed materials. Each object had its story. Others discussed what they did during the first day of the convention and what they intended to do in the days to come. The group’s clothing was a wash of neutral colors: brown, black, grey, and khaki. Bodies were accented by herringbone wool, repurposed antique hardware, leather, brass, copper, and mahogany colored faux weaponry. It was all reminiscent of a time since past coupled with nineteenth century projections of the future, most of which never came to fruition. Women donned corsets in ornate textiles and rich leathers. They had holsters, retro-futuristic weaponry, and hats with feathery plumes, some in full length Victorian dresses. The men wore vests, suits, frock coats, and leather armor, some with wool bowlers or top hats, several sported goggles, monocles, and held complex contraptions. They moved back and forth, making room for more cosplayers to join the group as they waited for the parade to begin. As I stepped back to take a few photos of the group as a whole, a contingent of steampunks approached from the East. I headed in their direction and soon met a man who went by the name Lawrence T. Codger. During our interview, he never broke from his persona. For that moment, he was Lawrence T. Codger, a time- traveling nineteenth century British explorer. The man who called himself Codger was dressed in a light-colored khaki short sleeve shirt with an auburn smoking pipe tucked away in his shirt pocket, a pair of matching shorts and pith helmet on top of which rested a pair of brass looking goggles. His hands were sheathed in black leather gloves, his feet in austere brown leather hiking boots. Above those, he wore New Directions in Folklore 6 a matching set of bright crimson socks held in place by black sock garters. He was a caricature of colonization in the flesh. As he and two others in matching attire moved closer, I couldn’t help but notice the large weapon he held in his hand. It consisted of two long pieces of polished brass colored tubing closed by a large black plug on one end and open on the other. At the open ends of the tubing, large metal-looking circular saw blades were held in place by faux-brass fixtures. Attached to the worn brass body of the weapon were two handles, black and white, constructed from a pair of salvaged table legs and a metal clasp that held in place a crimson leather belt Lawrence T. Codger displays his large faux weapon named “Lula Belle.” that wrapped around the wearer’s neck. I approached Codger and asked him if he would answer a few questions. “Yes, yes,” he responded in a conspicuously nineteenth century-esque British accent. “What got you interested in steampunk?” I asked. “Umm, I’m not actually sure, [he paused briefly and grinned] actually. I was taking a nap and then I woke up and all of a sudden I was here [he paused once more and cleared his throat]. I was terribly drunk at the time.” I asked him to tell me a bit about his costume and his accessories. Keeping in character, he lifted his weapon and said: Oh, this is Lula Belle. I had her customized for me. She’s a recoilless grapeshot cannon. Well, I was tired of the normal shotgun, and I wanted something with a little more power so, I contacted the Lehman manufacturing company, and they produced for me a recoilless grapeshot cannon, as you can see. And I had them add a Vol. 11, no. 1 (2013) 7 particularly mealy weapon at the front as my companions have also, and basically, it’s for slaughtering God’s creatures. “Any creature?” I asked. “Oh, absolutely if God created it, it’s there for us to destroy. That’s my motto! I’m sure they’ll be plenty more to come around.” He laughed a bit, took hold of his pipe and placed its stem firmly in his mouth. I thanked him for his time, and we parted ways. He and his companions moved deeper into the group of steampunks, and I headed the other direction. While other cosplayers dressed as a variety of recognizable popular culture personas within the parade had a vast repertoire of iconic postures to assume and dialogue to quote, the steampunks by and large did not. Rather than mimicking a particular character’s actions or using direct quotative language from a given media text, they instead spoke to me about their character(s) and costume(s). Their characters had personalities, occupations, backstories, as did their weaponry, clothing, and accessories. Narrative explanations for each object and entire ensembles formed a complex whole of textuality and materiality. Behind each object there were stories, and behind each story, there were objects. The oral and the material were inseparable. Between Objects and Texts In what follows, I explore the co-productive relationship of ‘objects,’ those “extra-somatic” (Ingold 2012, 429) material forms of palpable matter, and ‘narratives’ or ‘texts,’ meaning non-material discursive forms like oral discourse or kinesic expression (Birdwhistell 1970). While texts do not necessarily have a physical presence, they are nonetheless inseparable from the concrete materiality in which they are conceived and deployed (Voloshinov 1986, 95-100). Take, for example, the monograph, perhaps the quintessence of textuality.